


Sunflowers

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa, F/M, Fluff, Healing, Romantic Friendship, Trans Female Character, flower shop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-05 20:08:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17331527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Most times, chances are like monocarpic flowers – they bloom once and once only before they're gone. But if second chances were unnatural, this wouldn't feel so absolutely right.





	Sunflowers

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, friends! You probably noticed from the tags that this fic was a bit of a departure from The Usual for me. XD It was written for gaymahad on Trashfiremblr (previous and perhaps more FMA-familiar URL was russelltringham!), who wanted some Al/Fletcher in keeping with some really lovely transgirl Fletcher headcanons. (You can check out some of those [here](http://gaymahad.tumblr.com/post/163579299495/fullmetal-alchemist-fletcher-tringham-infp) and [here](http://gaymahad.tumblr.com/post/167532688625/she-didnt-always-know-but-she-cant-remember)!)
> 
> I really fell in love with this interpretation of Fletcher while I was working on this; and you guys probably already know how in love I am with CoS!Al and the complicated things that must be going on in his poor brain. So here we are!
> 
> I hope you guys like it, too! And if you don't think you will, like… honestly, please don't read it. :') It was written on request and is very personally meaningful to the requester, and that's not really the place for criticism. (Translation: if you REALLY feel the need to complain about my writing, like, go ahead, but leave Fletcher out of it. XD Exception to translation: if you're trans and find something in here wrong or upsetting or hurtful, please don't hesitate to let me know so I can see about fixing it.)
> 
> Anyway, it's an AU where the Elrics get back to Amestris after CoS, because of course it is. c: Let my children be happy 2kalways. ♥

The problem with overreacting is that by the time you’re doing it, even if you’re completely aware of it, there’s nothing you can do.  Once you see the tip of the tidal wave, it’s already too late.

Well—here she is, then: overreacting.  Or maybe she’s overreacting to her own self-directed accusations that she’s overreacting.  Maybe she’s reacting, and it’s only marginally over-the-top, and it’s her own insistence that it’s an _over_ reaction that’s emphasizing it enough to alter the fundamental proportions of the feelings in question, and—

Fletcher holds both hands over her eyes, takes a very deep breath, holds it while she counts to ten, and then lets it out slow.

It’s Al.  Even if Al concocts his letters with the deliberate precision of a thousand chemistry experiments, and upwards of forty percent of their content is purposefully misleading, he’ll _still_ be wonderful.  Sixty percent of the Al whose letters she’s been folding back up and tucking carefully into a swelling file behind the headboard of the bed would be amazing.  Any percentage of him would.  Even if the creator of all of those words was inexplicably intent on deceiving her in some way, every flick of his pen on the page is overpoweringly, overwhelmingly amazing, and—

And it only makes sense to overreact to someone who is overwhelming, doesn’t it?

She sits down and tries the ten-second trick again.  Most days, it’s much more helpful; but most days, Al’s not on a train out to visit in person for the first time in… years.  Five of them, to be precise.  For the first time since she told him; and for the first time since he came back from the other place.

The Al who came back isn’t the same one who left—he’s said so, in about so many words, but she knew it long before she read it.  The Al who came back has lived in two separate but overlapping timelines.  The Al who came back became acquainted with a number of the same people twice.

She’s one of them.  He stopped by, before—the solitary Al, the one who had never waited out a thousand endless nights, silent and unmoving, listening to his sleeping brother breathe.  The one who had never hurled himself into danger, over and over, mostly because he knew it couldn’t hurt him in any way that mattered—but a little bit because he hoped that if it did, somehow, he’d know that he was real.  The one who had never sat with her and talked, very softly, with that tinny little echo, about what they both would have wanted to do if it hadn’t come to this.

He’s really happy for her, that she struck out and set up this shop after all, and it’s going more or less all right so far—or at least that’s what the letters say.  She believes them.  She wants to believe them.  Surely _wanting_ it enough has to have some sort of creationary power—alchemists will things into being all the time.

Al and Ed are both still trying to figure out what they want.  The old answers aren’t good enough anymore—and he’s not who he was anymore, so she can understand that.  It’s not enough, now, to open up a veterinary clinic and adoption agency and start looking after strays.  Maybe it never was.  Maybe he only ever said that to make her little child’s dream sound less stupid in comparison.

She wants to believe that he meant it, though, while she’s believing in things so avidly that they’re not going to have any choice other than to go along with it and wind up being true.  It’s just that a lot has changed since then.  He’s done a lot; he’s seen a lot; she can guess at the contours of the edges of the iceberg, but even that he’s careful about.  She gets the sense that it’s not personal.  She gets the sense that he’s used to tamping down the tumult of emotions—that he’s used to hiding, because he’s used to having nobody but Ed to trust.

Maybe she’s flattering herself, but she likes to think that the letters have helped.  They certainly helped her: the simple act of articulation untangled her thoughts; trying to lay out her feelings so that someone else could understand them made them manageable even when they continued to be a bit of a mess.  At least they were a mess that she could look at and make some sense of, and spelling them out line by line to someone who claimed to want to hear about them made the hurricane of emotions that howled around her seem surmountable for the first time.

She hopes that was the way it was for Al, too.  She doesn’t know for sure whether he learned the secrecy from Ed in the other place, or if he learned it on his own, before that—in the empty space before Ed crash-landed in this world again.  Maybe it was a combination of the two.  Maybe once he realized that no one here could possibly understand the doubleness, and the dreams, and the wracking genius, and the chasm of a loss he couldn’t categorize or hope to explain, he just stopped trying.  And then maybe when he found Ed again, as he was trying to unlearn all of the in-between-Al’s self-preservation habits, things started to be so hard for them that the silence became a kind of armor all over again.

Unfortunately, that is not the sort of question that you open a conversation with when one of your oldest friends comes to pay you a personal visit after a half a decade that’s been very eventful for you both.

But she wonders.

She replied to his last letter, of course, but she did it so quickly that she barely had a chance to touch on any of the real content—because she had to write fast and slip it into the post and send her response to him before he could change his mind.  Not that she thinks he _would_ , but—just in case.  Because he might.  Because anybody might do anything, and sometimes you realize that you can never really know people until it’s too late.

She’s read it five or six more times since then, though.  She’s had some time to think about the rest.

_Dearest Fletcher,_

_I suppose there’s no way to say this except just to say it – well, okay, to write it, but now I’m just procrastinating, after all of the very lovely things I was going to say about how equivocation doesn’t solve anything at all.  Oh dear.  All right._

_I think I’m feeling up to traveling again.  I was reading the paper this morning, and I glanced at the train schedules, and skimming down the destinations made me feel… interested?  Something like interested.  I’m not sure how to quantify it – something in between interest and optimism, maybe?  But it was definitely positive, and that’s a change.  For a while – for a long time – it was always this drop of my stomach like being in a faulty elevator, and then after a while that went numb, and it was always just… sort of a trepidation, I think.  A mild sort of dread.  But this time…_

_Anyway!  The point is, if you’re available, I’d love to see you!  I’m hoping they must have a lot of charming bed-and-breakfast places out in Wellesley?  If you know of any that have resident pets, you must tell me so that I can call ahead and beg them to make space for me!_

_Of course this isn’t an obligation, I should have said that – written that, it always just feels like I’m talking to you – first.  I’m sorry if it’s sudden; it just came as such a relief that I felt like I first had to tell someone, and second had to do something, and here we are.  If there’s any reason whatsoever, “valid” or otherwise – I think all reasons are valid; I think all_ feelings _are valid – why it would be an imposition or you just would rather that I didn’t, I don’t even need a reason.  Just say another time would work better, and if that’s true, you can pick the time you like; and if it’s not, then we’ll pretend no one ever said anything.  I don’t mind.  I won’t hold it against you._

_Wow, this has taken longer to circle back around than it would have if I’d just said it from the beginning.  That was silly of me.  I hope this isn’t awkward.  It’s awkward, isn’t it?  Gosh, I’m sorry!_

_Well, if you want a giant awkward presence in your wonderful shop, scaring all of the flowers into growing better, just let me know, and I’ll be there with bells on._

_Now that I’ve digressed so far that if you climbed to the top of the tangent, you could see the curvature of the planet – were you able to get that window fixed?  I keep thinking about your window.  I hope that’s not too strange – just strange enough, with any luck.  Ed always says I’m the lucky one, but half of what Ed says is reactionary and the other half is histrionic, so sometimes I don’t know which to read into things.  Ed also says I’m the kind of strange that he likes, though, so maybe if I_ am _lucky, that’s the kind that you like, too, and it’s all right to be thinking about your window in my spare time._

_It would be sad to have a broken window on a flower shop, though!  Pragmatically speaking, it’s very damaging to your business, since you’re losing valuable display space; and in addition to that it’s a safety risk in so many ways.  Let me know if you got it taken care of.  Glass can be tricky, since it’s… well.  You know.  A liquid that doesn’t really act like a liquid except when it does._

_I’m very sorry, the train thing has got me even more agitated than normal today.  I’m such a mess!  I hope you’ll forgive me.  I know you’ll say you will, because you’ve always been so nice, but I hope you really do._

_The point is… there was a point, I swear.  The point is I was thinking about your window, and I found myself thinking I wanted to get my hands on whoever did it.  That thought registered to me as remarkable, and it threw me for enough of a loop that I didn’t end up thinking anything more specific than that, but I don’t know which part of me it was that thought it.  Which_ me _it was, I suppose I could say.  I think the thing I’m most scared of is that both lives I lived are capable of it – the one that would have died and taken anyone I had to with me to save Brother would have done it; and the one that watched others die to get him back would have, too.  I like to think I’ve learned better, in the intervening years, but… well.  I suppose you can’t help the things you think.  Impulses are just electricity when you really get right down to it, and it’s how you act on them (or don’t) that matters, more than the first flicker in your brain._

_I’m sorry, this whole letter is a disaster!  Started out disorganized, and now it’s dark… Maybe you should move and not tell me your new address, at this rate!_

_I just know that I can trust you, on such a fundamental level that I let out a lot of things I lock up the rest of the time.  I’m sorry for that, as a general concept, setting aside the fact that it manifests in terribly-written letters.  Agreeing to correspond definitely did not consist of a contract obligating you to deal with things like this, and I always tell myself I’m not going to drop any more of it in your lap, but then… I do.  And we end up here.  And I’m sorry for that.  I keep holding back from dumping on poor Brother since he’s worse off than I am, and I know he does the same for me because he thinks it’s the other way around, and it’s not your fault at all that you ended up in the crossfire, so to speak.  How’s that for an equivalent exchange?  Compassion lands you in the middle of an Elric emotional-suppression battlefield.  Not what you signed up for!_

_I guess when you get right down to it, none of us signed up for anything.  We just wound up here and had to try to figure out how to make the best of it._

_But all of that is very, very, very far beside the point, and the point is that I want to hear more about you!  How are things?  How is business?  Do you have sunflowers?  Does talking to plants really help them grow better, and do you have data on it, and does it matter what you say, and is there any kind of alchemical explanation?  Brother will want to know if it’s a chemistry thing because he thinks everything is a chemistry thing.  I suppose you could make the argument that distributing the carbon dioxide much more directly to the leaves by exhaling on them might have a notable effect, since it probably does lower the amount of energy they’d need for chemical transport otherwise?  I’m not sure.  But I’d love to know more.  I’d love to know everything._

_I was thinking about one of the other things you wrote before – you were talking about how hard it is to find a place that feels like it fits right.  And about how a part of you always thinks that the solution is going back – going home, or going somewhere that worked before, or going back in time.  But it never does.  It’s never right, retracing your steps, because your feet are different by the time you get there.  Your shape is different, and even if you fit before, you won’t now.  And then you’re disappointed on top of feeling so alone._

_That’s part of why I want to visit, I guess.  Not because I’m trying to steal your place!  That would be ridiculous, and I’d be a terrible florist anyway.  I just want so badly to see someone who_ has _found somewhere – like maybe if I can show my brain that it’s really possible, it’ll be a step on the way towards trying it on my own.  And you have.  Or at least it seems like it, and I really hope so.  I’m so happy for you.  I’m so happy that you never gave up, and you never gave in, and you never let anyone else tell you who to be or where to go or what to seek out or do or hope for.  That is such a wonderful thing, and I’d love to see it for myself and share it with you, even if it’s only for a little while._

_I guess that’s my elevator pitch, and I think I may just have to cut this letter off while it’s nice and circular before I make any bigger a mess of the poor thing!  Please do forgive me.  My thoughts get so scattered some days.  Ed always says it’s the two Als fighting for brainspace.  I don’t understand why they can’t just get along._

_I think that’s another reason you were the first person I wanted to see when I wanted to go somewhere and see someone.  You are so_ you _, Fletcher.  You are so entirely and unreservedly you, and you have fought to hold onto that, and there is such a completeness to the person that you are that I think there’s a part of me that just wants to be near you and bask in it for a while._

_That sounds silly, too, but a lot of things that sound silly at the beginning aren’t, I think, when you get there.  I hope this is one of them._

_All of my best,_

_Al_

All of him—the best and otherwise—will be here very soon, and somehow she is going to have to survive.

  


* * *

  


He’s doing better than he feared, but not quite as well as he hoped—or at least that’s what it feels like.  Is it possible to gauge one’s own psychological reactions with any degree of accuracy while still experiencing them?  That sounds like questionable scientific observation to say the least.  Ed would reject it out of hand—out of either hand; he wouldn’t be picky about which.

Still, so far it’s… all right.  It’s all right.  He can hear his own heartbeat too clearly in his ears, and every time they grind to a halt at a station, and the people mill and bustle and make noise, and several someones shuffle by in the aisle, his chest starts to tighten up, and his head spins a bit, but—all in all.  All in all, if that’s the worst of it, he can handle this.

And that’s more than just progress: it’s power.  It’s liberating.  After all of the endless moving and running and hiding and fighting and fleeing, he’s been so _trapped_ by the strength of his aversion to the very idea of crossing space that he wasn’t sure he’d ever want to step on a train again.  There were days that the market sounded like too far a trek.

He leans his head against the windowpane—which is not nearly as comfortable as Brother always used to make it look.  The glass rattles a little with the movement of the train, and he can hear the rumbling of the wheels along the tracks more loudly when he’s pressed against the wall of the car like this.  He confirmed the longstanding theory that Brother could and can and will sleep through just about anything ages ago, but sometimes it still surprises him just how deep that particular talent ran.

It’s nice, though, even if it’s noisy.  He likes watching the trees go by, and there are a whole heck of a lot of them out here; apparently the West is full of forests, and nobody ever even told him.  Maybe if his good spirits hold up, he can keep on traveling for a while.  There were so many trees, too many trees, in France and Germany and Poland, but the trees are different here.

Everything’s different here.  The air’s different.  Ed says it’s just the smoke—that the other world is much more industrialized than this one, and what they couldn’t make with alchemy they powered with coal, and they’ve polluted every molecule that ever aspires to being aspirated—but Al thinks it’s more than that.  Sure, the chemical composition might be marginally different to start with, just as a matter of terraforming and climate and so forth, but he thinks it’s more than that, too.  He thinks it’s something fundamental.

It’s not that this world is _better_ , exactly—far from it; this place has its oozing black corruptions just like the other.  But they’re… gentler, somehow.  Maybe that’s just acclimation.  Maybe the evil you’ve internalized since the instant of your birth feels kinder simply because it’s seeped into your bones.  Maybe the devils you know by heart speak softer to your soul.

It doesn’t matter why—the bottom line is that it’s good to be home.  It’s good to be somewhere that the sky feels stable overhead, and the buildings’ walls don’t close in on the narrow streets, and the grass feels right between your toes—and to be a version of yourself that _can_ feel it.  All the lost years—

Well.  He tries not to worry about them too much, for all the good that trying does when the flocks of what-ifs with their black-feathered wings come to roost.  He tries not to waste too much time wondering how old he _really_ is, when you get down to it—what all the sleepless nights and the overlapping years add up to.  No one’s ever lived a life like his before.  What does it all—what does any of it—really mean?

He always reminds himself that it doesn’t matter.  He’s here; he’s here _now_ ; he’s what he is, nothing more or less.

The important thing is that the trees look right, and kind, and welcoming; the important thing is that he’s slowly been able to convince his fingers to relax where they clenched themselves tightly in the fabric of his slacks when he sat down.  The important thing is that he’s on his way to see someone he likes a great deal, and he’s excited for it, and the world’s still turning, and Ed’s getting better by degrees.  The important thing is that bright yellow flowers sprout from the cracks in the sidewalk when you’re not looking, purely to spite the concrete trying to crush them down.  The important thing is that life goes on, and if you can scrabble your way towards a decent handhold, it’ll take you along with it.

His heart starts to pound a little as they draw into the station, and the train car shudders, and steam billows everywhere.  It’s not that he’s expecting anything _bad_ to happen—this is Fletcher, after all; Fletcher’s always been one of the kindest and most supportive people that he’s ever known.  When they were kids; when they were strangers; when he caught wind of her situation and wrangled her address out of Russell and sent her the first unheralded letter.

The first one was to apologize for the fact that he’d disappeared when she and Russell were waiting for him and Ed, only then to come back, halfway across the country, as a person who didn’t even recognize her anymore.  The second letter was to apologize for making it seem like she was obligated to respond to the first letter, and then to ask a few things about plant alchemy that he’d lain awake some nights wondering on the other side but hadn’t sat down here to test yet.  By the fourth, he was telling her how brokenhearted he’d been the first time he’d done that—laid awake, when he _had_ another option.  How much it made his ribs ache; how he’d tried to bury it deep enough that Ed wouldn’t see.  Ed was so tired in those days, when the other place started to close in around them, and all of the running from institutions that meant them harm ceased to be a game.  Ed didn’t have enough of himself left to hope for anything; Ed didn’t have enough of himself left to muster more than a shred of enthusiasm about _chemistry_.  Al didn’t want to burden him with anything else.  Ed’s spine would have split down the middle from the weight.

It was a mistake, in a way—telling Fletcher.  Once he’d spilled one secret, the rest followed in a torrent he could barely try to guide, let alone restrain, and she was just so _generous_ with her time and her encouragement and her warmth and the sweet, bright little updates about the shop and the flowers and the good, growing things still finding their way up through the pavement.

The other place leaves a pall on you—black mist like a burial shroud, trailing behind you everywhere you try to drag your feet.  When they made it back here, Al didn’t know if it was ever going to lift.

Fletcher helped.  Fletcher helped more than he thinks she knows.

The train’s barely stopped moving before people start rushing to the exits—Wellesley is a transfer station, so he shouldn’t be surprised, but the flurry of motion startles him despite his best attempts to calm himself with logic.  With so many people shifting at once, and so much fabric rustling, and so many suitcases banging against the overhead shelf rails and the sides of the seats and other people’s knees, it’s impossible to be positive that none of the people who glance at him are looking _for_ something; that none of the people moving closer are actually coming _towards_ him—

The moment there’s a lull in the current, he jumps up, hauls his suitcase out from under his seat, and heads to the door as briskly as he can.  His skin crawls; he tries to focus on the sounds of his own footsteps on the wooden slats of the floor of the car; his heartbeat feels too erratic to be trusted as a measure of progress, but surely individual paces—

He reaches the stairs, grasps on to the little iron railing, and eases himself down before his momentum sends him head over heels and lands his suitcase who-knows-where.  This is all right.  Everything’s all right.  Once he’s clear of the crowds, he’ll be fine; he’ll be able to breathe without feeling like oxygen’s molecular properties have changed, and now it sticks to the walls of a susceptible esophagus instead of coursing down into his lungs where it belongs.

He keeps his head down and holds his suitcase close to his chest, forging through the station, fixing his eyes on the archway that leads out to the street—there are so many people in hats, and coats; everyone in black and brown and gray; the shades muddle around him and twist together at the corners of his eyes.  The gate has the words _WELLESLEY STATION_ spelled out in big iron letters, arcing across the top; from here, they’re backwards, and he traces his gaze along the contours of the flipped letters and does not let his breathing start to hitch.

It’s fine.  It’s fine.  It’s—

_So_ much quieter even just four steps on the other side of the gate.  He hangs a right and then sidles out of the path of the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of a bakery as if it’s a casual gesture, rather than a desperate necessity to make sure his knees don’t give way.

This is the price.  He supposes it’s fair enough—equivalent, mostly.  This is the price that he and Ed have to pay for making it home.  The Gate didn’t take much—no blood, other than what they had to douse the array with to activate it; no limbs, no lives, no tears.  They both felt woozy on arriving, sure, but a drop out of the sky will do that, and blood loss doesn’t help, and a pair of reckless rule-breakers like the pair of them thought so damn little of it—

The Gate must have known they’d already given up enough.  The other world took so many little pieces of them: nicks and gashes and chunks of flesh that scarred over pink and white; any hope they’d ever had of finding somewhere to fit into the coal-blackened, jagged monochrome of the roads and the buildings and the bare-branched trees; any love they ever tried to foster for their fellow human beings, whatever world they’d been born into; every last spark of interest and every last minute of sleep this side of sheer exhaustion; blood and blood and blood.

It’s over.  He has to remember that it’s over.  He has to remind himself as many times as it takes, so that he can give _this_ life a fighting chance.

The passersby here all have their heads down, most of those heads in hats.  Should he have worn a hat?  It’s not so cold yet that he feels bereft without one, and Ed could never stand to cram his indomitable hair beneath such confines, so Al always forewent them in solidarity.  It’s nice, though—that other people are wearing hats.  Lots of different colors; lots of different shapes; lots of different things to think about entirely divorced from the way his heart keeps slamming itself against the back of his sternum, trying to shake him to pieces from the inside out.

Half a dozen counted-out deep breaths later, his knees feel steadier, and the heartbeat in his ears doesn’t bear quite so strong a resemblance to a tap-dance number.  He braces a hand against the wall behind him just in case as he straightens, and then he fishes Fletcher’s letter out of his coat pocket.

She didn’t stop at directions: she drew him a map.  That was so thoughtful that he’s not quite sure where to start on _thank you_.  She’s been a pillar for him in so many ways for so long now that it seems unimaginable that there would be words that could contain it, but somehow he has to try.  He owes her more than just his best effort at articulating some piece of the muddle in his head.

He listens to the uncoordinated cadences of his footfalls and his heartbeat as he walks, and every step brings him closer to where she’ll be—to where she’s been all this time, while he’s been jaunting back and forth between worlds.  He supposes it wasn’t really jaunting; more of an ungainly crash-landing sort of maneuver in both cases.  Still, it seems odd, somehow, after all this time, to approach the physical location she inhabits.  She’s been an entity to him—a voice, a mind, a heart, a solace—for a long time, more than ever this past year, but to be nearing her actual, tangible, true _proximity_ almost feels like violating something sacred.

Well, let it be violated.  He wants to see her; he wants to touch her arm and hug her tight and watch the smile burgeon across her face when she speaks.  He’s been imagining it all this time, and he likes to think he’s earned the real thing by now.

The pain and the magic of the passage of time is that it carries you forward, whether you like it or not.  All things move, and pass, and slip between your fingers no matter how tightly you cup your hands.  He can almost hear Brother’s old pocket-watch’s second-hand inside his head; sometimes when the nights were long, he’d pick it up from the nightstand as gently as he could manage and listen to it ticking, just to remind himself that the otherwise-silent darkness wouldn’t last forever.

It’s just three more turns, and then two, and then the last block, and he can see the sign— _Fletcher’s Florals_ in huge gold letters on a forest-green sign, and there’s a matching green-and-white awning over the door.  She’s just boarded up the left-side window—maybe she needs help with it; glass can be a bit of a beast.  The window on the right is sectioned into half a dozen smaller panes by the design of the frame, so perhaps it’s just logistically more than she has time for right now.  He’ll try to offer in a way that’s not insulting.  His alchemy isn’t what it was, anyway; the time on the other side has seen to that.  Everything fades, and everything unused starts to wring itself dry within you, and then it starts to wither.

He always hoped against hope that his heart wouldn’t follow suit.

It’s lifting in his chest, now, whatever the state of it underneath.  His breath comes a little short—a turn of phrase that Ed would absolutely treasure—as he heads towards the shop.

He finds himself smiling; finds himself walking faster until it almost qualifies as a jog—certainly not a run, and there’s no spring in it; of course not.  He reaches towards the door with his fist curled to knock and then remembers that this is, in fact, a business.  You don’t knock on the door of a shop; you just walk in.  Sometimes there’s a bell.  Fletcher seems like the bell type.

Al draws a deep breath, successfully squares his shoulders, unsuccessfully attempts to quell his nerves, and lets himself inside.

  


* * *

  


Fletcher’s doing the books to try to keep her mind occupied—which means she’ll just have to do them again later to make sure she didn’t transpose any numbers while she was jerking on the leash around her mind and hauling it back on course, but the effort of attempting to think about anything other than Alphonse Elric walking through that doorway has to count for something.  She’s not sure what, but—something.  Surely.

She didn’t let herself pore over the train schedules and estimate which one was most likely to carry him here from Central; he’s going to come, and that’s the most important thing, and obsessing about precisely when won’t make him arrive any sooner or incline him to like her any more.

He will, though, won’t he?  Like her.  Enough people don’t that it’s a statistical possibility, and generally her philosophy is that anyone who doesn’t appreciate her idiosyncrasies doesn’t deserve them anyway, but this is different.  This is _Al_.  Al’s important.  He always has been.  He and Ed both, really—they have had an air of significance around them since the very beginning, and it changed in character when Al lost his memories, but it never really left.  It rises off of every word he puts onto the page.  The Elric Brothers matter, to the universe and to individuals.  And Al matters to _her_.

The door opens, and the little line of silver bells above the door chimes, and if her head jerks up suspiciously quickly, well—

It’s Mrs. Jones, who lives just down the road and teaches part-time at the nearest school.  She’s an avid gardener, and her two young children are avid garden-tramplers, but Fletcher’s plants tend to hold up better than the average specimen of flora.

“Hello, dear,” Mrs. Jones says as she shuts the door behind her, reaching into her purse for what’s almost certainly an updated list of colors she’d like to integrate into a new design plan.  As soon as everything springs up, Tommy and Eleanor will make short work of it, but hopefully she’ll get to enjoy it for a few days.  Fletcher’s seed offerings tend to last for about a week—child-proofing seems to be a bit out of her skill range as of yet, but she’s got several days on anyone else that Mrs. Jones has bought from.  “Can I trouble you for a few suggestions?”

“Of course,” Fletcher says, getting up and dodging around the corner of her desk-slash-cash-register-table to meet Mrs. Jones halfway through the store and consider the list with her.  “I did just get a new crop of violets—those will be easy for little feet to step on, though.  Maybe a climber?  Are they as impressive when it comes to things that grow on vines?”

“I’m not quite sure,” Mrs. Jones says, running a fingertip down the list.  “I might have to move a few things around in the plan, but that would certainly be worth a try, now, wouldn’t it?”

Fletcher beams at her.  “I have just the thing.”

“You always do, dear,” Mrs. Jones says as Fletcher starts back for the packets of seeds and little mesh bags of bulbs that she tucks away into labeled compartments in the set of cubby holes behind her desk.  “It’s such a blessing that you’re here for us.”

The first thing that slices through her is a spear of old, half-scarred-over hurt.  The second is a pang of embarrassment at the way that such a harmless comment just cut through all that she’s done and made and become since those days, dredging up the miserable ancient history.  She’s been left behind too many times and lost too much for what was meant as a pleasantry not to linger.

But she can’t afford to start walking down that road—not today.  Not with Al on the way here, to see her for the first time in years—and to see her, with both his own eyes and his own memories, for the first time _ever_.  She can’t make a bad impression.  She can’t mess this up.

People need other people to be there for them, is all.  People need to know that the ones they trust won’t fail them.  People need to know that when they rely on someone they love to _be_ there, they will reach out and be met halfway.  People need to know that they’re worth fighting for, if that’s what it might take.

Russell’s the only person she loves who’s never let her down.  He’s the only one she was ever _safe_ with, in the ways that matter; he was the only one who did more than just letting her be her real self—he encouraged it, coaxed her, _helped_.  He walked her to the stores and walked straight past the men’s sections with her and stood there, watching the aisles with his eyes aflame, ready to challenge anyone passing by, as she picked out a couple things she liked.  Then he insisted on buying them for her, even though they both knew he was down to his bottom dollar too.

Would her father have done that?  Even at his best, would he have listened and actually _heard_?

It’s impossible to know, but that can’t stop her from wondering, and the wondering’s what hurts.

She takes a deep breath as she drags her fingers along the wooden slats dividing up the checkerboard of choices, skimming over the strips of paper naming all the plants inside.  It used to be that she’d just grow all the flowers she needed in the back, cut them, arrange them, and do her best to special-order unusual requests from larger nurseries and greenhouses nearby, but she started saving some of the alchemically-bolstered seeds on a bit of a whim.  People seemed to buy them somewhat impulsively, but then the word began to spread that Fletcher’s offerings braved the ravages of the cold and the heat alike far better than any other supplier’s stock.  Sometimes people come from well out of town for her flowers now, which makes her feel satisfied in a small, warm, sweet way that’s difficult to describe.  It’s not a _pride_ , exactly—more like a medley of fulfillment and relief.

In any case, she’s going to find Mrs. Jones the brightest, best, most durable purple vine flowers that the world has ever seen—and some yellows, and an orange, and a vibrant pink.  Mrs. Jones’s lists are very nice and detailed, which she appreciates a lot.  Alchemy works better when you’re organized; it only makes sense that gardening would, too.

As she’s ringing up Mrs. Jones and taping all the little packets to the information cards explaining exactly how to treat them for the best results, the door bells sing out cheerfully again, and she glances up, and—

And this time, it _is_ Al.

She goes entirely still for a long second, which she supposes is better than simply collapsing to the floor.

It’s just that he’s so… real.  So real, and so different, and so tall, and so clever-eyed, and so _gorgeous_ —

And he smiles and lifts his shoulders in the tiniest shrug, giving a slight nod to Mrs. Jones in a way that wordlessly conveys _Don’t worry; take your time_.

Al was always so damn good at that—at communicating, and at making her feel right at home.

Mrs. Jones is a longtime patron and a wonderful human being and ought to get Fletcher’s undivided attention until the moment that she walks back out the door, but it’s growing progressively more difficult to sort through bills and coins instead of just rambling.  Al is standing right there, in the flesh, and he looks a lot like she remembers, but not at all the same.

Perhaps today is lucky every way around: Mrs. Jones doesn’t seem to notice anything amiss.  She chirps out a thank-you just like the regular one and then makes her merry way out, and the bell tinkles behind her, leaving Fletcher standing behind the desk, and Al standing next to the begonias, head tilted slightly, with a slowly-widening little smile.

“Sorry,” Fletcher says, helplessly.

“Please don’t be,” Al says.  “I’m so glad you’re doing well.”

“Thank you,” Fletcher says.  Her heart does an awful lurchy thing.  “Um—hi!  Welcome!  I guess that’s a little late.”

“Right on time, I think,” Al says.  He steps forward, hesitates for just a fraction of a second, and then steps forward again and opens his arms.  “Are we—is it all right to—”

She wants to say something reasonable, since she knows she won’t manage anything witty or fun, but nothing of any kind emerges before she’s throwing herself right into the hug.

Al smells good, and he’s so warm, and his wool coat’s so soft, and his arms wrap the perfect kind of tight.

Just as she’s about to worry that he’s only holding on this long to humor her, he steps back, and he’s smiling, and she looks up at him, and her brain tries and fails to stop her mouth.

“You cut your hair,” she says.

_Obviously_.

He doesn’t point out how dumb that was, though—just gestures towards her and says, “You grew yours out.”

“Yeah,” she says, and she knows it’s a little silly to raise a hand to it at the mere mention and twirl a bit of it around her fingertip, but instinct owns her when her guard is down, and Al’s obliterated every fence and moat and battlement she ever hoped to have just by walking through that door.  It’s not nearly as long as his was—her hair, that is—but it’s a bit past her ears now, and it tickles sometimes, but she likes being able to run her fingers through.

His eyes weren’t soft like this, before—soft, and endlessly deep, and unfathomably sad.  They were brighter, the last time.  That Al had lost a lot of things, and then lost things that he’d never known he’d had, but there was so much hope and fire and spirit in him that you could hardly see the pain.  He muffled it with a manic-edged determination that no force in any world, certainly not this one, could have stymied or stopped, and all that was visible from the surface was a streak of a blood-red coat and a startlingly incisive boy with a whip of brown hair trailing behind.  He was always pushing, and he was always asking, and he was always on the move.  He wasn’t the Al she’d known before, and he was vastly different from the one she’s looking at now.

“I’m sorry about your window,” he says.

“I don’t care,” Fletcher says, and she means it.  “I have just as much right to be here as anybody else, and if they don’t like it, they’re going to have to give me a good enough reason to leave.  I like it here.  Most of the people like me, too.  And I’m not scared of anyone who thinks minor property damage counts as intimidation.  They weren’t even quiet about it; it just took me a little while to undo the locks and get downstairs, and by then, they’d run off already.  No nasty note or anything.  Pretty amateurish, honestly, if you ask me.”

That’s… maybe a touch over the top, but it’s what she feels, plain and simple.  If she babbles a little when faced with a boy who’s tall with soft brown eyes and caramel-colored hair and the single sweetest dusting of freckles across his nose that she’s ever seen on another human being—

Well, it’s not _her_ fault.  That’s all.

But Al just… grins?

“Me, too,” he says.  “It’s not an especially effective threat.  Is there any chance I can convince you to let me help you put it back?”

“I didn’t ask you to come here so that I could put you to work,” Fletcher says, shoving her hands into her pockets and leaning back on her heels.  “It’s supposed to be a vacation.”

“I suppose,” Al says.  “But I’d hate to impose on you without giving anything back.”

“Equivalent exchange isn’t required for friendships,” Fletcher says, and the word feels wrong in her mouth, but none of the others are small enough to be spoken aloud without choking her on the way up.  “Or if it is, it’s much more nebulous than that.  I’m really glad you’re here.  I don’t want you to feel obligated to _do_ anything—it’s not like you’re putting me out.”

He’s smiling still, but his eyes flick back and forth a bit as he searches her face—to try to figure out if she’s telling the truth, most likely.  He probably recognizes by now that she usually does: there’s not much point lying about the little things once you’ve loosed the biggest secret and embraced how utterly sublime it feels to open the floodgates and be who you _are_.

“If you’re sure,” he says.  “I really wouldn’t mind.  It might be fun, but I don’t want to be in the way, either.”

“You wouldn’t be,” Fletcher says, because no one as brilliant as Al could possibly mess up at helping with this sort of thing.  “But I… I mean, if you want—I can definitely afford to close up most of the time that you’re here, so that we could… I mean, there are a few museums and things, although if there’s anything you particularly want to do, or if you’d rather be by yourself, or—”

“What?” Al asks.  There’s a touch of pink in his cheeks.  Every time Fletcher dares to think he can’t get any cuter, he goes and does something like _blushing_.  That ought to be a crime.  “I—oh.  Well—I mean, I came to see—you.  So—it—it doesn’t matter much to me what we do, but…”

“Oh,” Fletcher manages around the frantic impulses waltzing around within the circumference of her ribcage.  “Um—are you—sure?”

Al’s smile starts out small—almost shy—and then broadens and brightens until it’s staged a coup of his entire face, and his eyes gleam with it.

“Yes,” he says.

“Okay,” she says.  It’s a lot bigger than that, of course—it’s about a thousand more questions, rather than an answer—but she can’t start unpacking all of that right now.  “Do you want to go get lunch?”

“Yes,” Al says again, and that one’s a lot simpler to work with.

  


* * *

  


It’s easy to talk about little things as they walk—about how a shop-front looks nice, about the person who runs the place, about how their son delivers the newspapers, about how sensationalist the newspapers are these days, about how much their perspective on Roy has changed over the past few years.  Perhaps the last one isn’t a little thing; certainly it’s not to Roy himself, but to them, now, strolling through the streets of a city Al’s never seen, with cars passing and people speaking, small talk gives him something to grasp onto.  Unimportant conversation is so much safer than the sorts of things they wrote about, late into so many nights, and mailed to one another wrapped up and crushed into envelopes, sealed with a swipe of a tongue and maybe an unvoiced benediction, even if neither of them’s likely to offer up a prayer.

How do you get from the little topics to the big ones when you’re standing in front of someone, though?  Most of the people Al’s been close to over the years have already known all of his secrets; with Ed and Winry, there were just never any distinctions, because automail maintenance and life and death and how Den was doing were all on the table at any given time.  Roy has a way of swanning past significance and then barging unceremoniously into seriousness precisely when he needed to—and knowing when it’s needed must be another skill entirely.  Al’s not entirely sure he has that one.  Can it be taught?  If it’s learnable, he’ll learn it, but if that’s an instinct that you have to be born with—

Fletcher leads them to a really sweet little café with wrought-iron chairs and tables out on the sidewalk and wicker furniture within.  The chalkboard menu is so expansive that it covers most of the wall behind the counter, and Al only realizes how hungry he is as he scans it.  Funny how a rapid heartbeat still distracts him from almost every other physical sign that his body tries to telegraph.

He regrets very little, considering the circumstances—considering how well it all went, and how much worse so much of it could have been—but he does feel slightly cheated by the fact that he never moved directly from the armor back into bone and muscle and skin.  He spent so many years dreaming of all of the _firsts_ he’d get to experience all over again—sweet foods and raindrops and the way a blanket gradually warms up.  Kitten fur; the delicate contours of their heads and their ribs and their spinal columns underneath it.

Instead, though, he re-experienced all of those things for the first time as someone who had never lost them, and then re-became a person who had, and by then he’d lost the chance to savor them _properly_.  It’s a bit of a shame.

Not too much, though.  Not enough to slow him down.

“May I buy you lunch?” he asks Fletcher, who stands just, perhaps, an inch closer to his elbow than someone might if they weren’t suppressing a desire to reach out and touch him.  “As a thank-you for letting me visit?”

“Why are you thanking me?” Fletcher asks.  “You’re the one who went to all the trouble.”

“It wasn’t any trouble,” Al says, which is a lie, but a very nice one, so he figures he’s allowed.

The way Fletcher glances at him makes it quite clear that she’s onto him—but also that she doesn’t seem to mind.

“You can get my lunch,” she says, “if you let me put you up instead of paying for a hotel.  How’s that?”

Al feels the smile on his mouth before he registers his own delight.  It’s an odd sensation, but it’s familiar to him by now.  He’s always wanted to ask Ed if that happens to other people, or if it’s just him, but he’s never found the right moment.

“Sounds equivalent enough,” he says.

“Good,” Fletcher says, returning her attention to the menu.

There are two more people in line ahead of them, so Al shifts his weight, picks something at random that should supply a relatively interesting combination of flavors and textures, and looks at Fletcher instead.

“I like your outfit,” he says.

She goes very still and glances over at him again—sharply this time—and then back at the menu, and then at him again.

That is… not the reaction that he expected.  Not exactly a normal reaction to what he supposed was a normal compliment.

Interesting.

Possibly bad, but definitely interesting nonetheless.

“Thanks,” she says, slowly, with her still gaze fixed on the menu and a downward turn to the corner of her mouth.  There’s a hint of something in the single syllable—something like… guardedness?  Suspicion?  Something like doubt; something like—

“Oh, no,” he says.  “I—Fletcher.  Do people usually say that to you—are they being sarcastic?  Do they—I wasn’t.  I swear I wasn’t.  I meant it.”

Fletcher swallows, and then she pries her eyes away from the menu long enough to pan them down over her clothes: a pale yellow shirt with little eyelets at the hems, faded indigo overalls, dark green boots with a low heel, and a necklace of bright ceramic beads shaped like sunflowers.  There’s a barrette in her hair to match.  When she’s finished surveying, she raises her eyes to Al again.

“You sure?” she asks, neutrally.

“Yes,” he says, fiercely this time, because he _does_ mean it.  “Nobody ever wears colors half enough, and sunflowers are my favorite.”

She watches him for another second, hands sliding into her pockets, and then cautiously starts to smile—as if his internal organs haven’t already squeezed themselves so hard that he feels like he’s suffocating.

“I guess the way your brother dresses probably made you fashion-blind,” she says.

It’s not the time to mention that Ed only dressed like a bleeding sunspot when he was young—when he was here, doggedly hopeful, desperate to be noticed, because being observed by others would prove that he was real.  In the other world, he never wore anything brighter than brown.  He didn’t touch blacks, either—grays, sometimes, but black was too distinct; all he wanted on that planet was to blend into the soot and the smog and the brickwork and disappear.

“It’s probably a good thing I didn’t have retinas back then,” Al says instead.  “I imagine there would have been some permanent damage after a while.”

That helps the smile spread a little wider, and it looks more genuine now, and Al’s insides start to disentangle from where they’ve been strangling one another, which is a relief.

Just then, the last person ahead of them pays and steps aside, though, so there’s no time to examine the edges of Fletcher’s smile anymore.

They sit down outside, and the combination of sensations caused by a breeze and a sunbeam striking his face at once still makes Al’s skin tingle with gratitude.  It can be so beautiful just _existing_.  Some days it’s difficult to remember that.

“Hey,” Fletcher says as they settle opposite each other.  She glances down at the table, fiddles with the corner of her napkin, and then glances at him, tentatively again, like she expects… well, like she doesn’t know quite what to expect, and she’s not sure she wants to find out.  “Can I ask you a really personal question?  I mean—obviously you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.  I don’t mind.”

Well, that solves the problem of having to come up with more small talk, at least.

“Of course,” Al says.  He crosses one leg over the other and lays his hand on the arm of the chair, which is a very polite- and socially-acceptable-looking way to brace himself.  He’s practiced that a lot over the years.  “What would you like to know?”

Fletcher toys with the napkin for another second, draws a deep breath, and looks him in the eyes.

“When you were in the armor,” she says, “how did you know you were still a person?  How did you _know_?”

Ah.

He weighs words for a few seconds, pressing his lips together so that none of them will escape before he’s vetted them.  Honesty is the best policy, but there are always a hundred-thousand ways to speak the truth, and choosing the kindest one is often what matters the most.

“I didn’t always,” he says.  “Some days, it was easy to believe; others, it… wasn’t.  I think that’s one of the hardest things about being a scientist—you have to continue to be a human being at the same time, but you want to be able to understand everything.  Eventually you run up against things that you can’t understand, because logic isn’t always the answer, and you can’t prove a feeling no matter how much you try.”  He leans back in his chair, looking at the sky.  Cirrus clouds.  Ed knows every single variety now; he was working on theories about atmospheric pressure and weather patterns and how they might affect escape velocity as a side project with the rockets.  “But I also knew that none of the other possible explanations were any _better_ , so the answer I had—even if it wasn’t necessarily provable—was the best one that I was likely to get.  And if none of the other answers add up, the best answer to the evidence you have might as well be the right answer.  It is, I think, in all the ways that count.”

Fletcher’s shoulders have been tightening the whole time he’s been speaking, but now they relax all at once like a dam cracking wide open, and she laughs—weak but genuine—as she collapses into her chair.

“I—yeah,” she says.  “That’s—that’s how I think of it.  I can’t prove that what I feel is more valid than what other people think I should.  But I just—I know.  I know myself better than anybody else ever could, and I know I’m right—same way you know you’re on the right track when all the data starts lining up.  Same feeling.  The—I don’t know, excited satisfaction sort of… thing.  And I can’t prove it’s the right answer, but I know for a fact that the other answer’s wrong.  When somebody—says something, it’s like—there’s this absolute conviction, this completely visceral _No_ that starts out in the bottom of my stomach and takes my whole heart with it on its way up—” She’s gesturing, and her hair keeps slipping into her almost-violet eyes, and her smile makes Al’s whole chest seize up so tight that he misses the armor for a moment.

Just the one.  But it’s not the first, or the worst, or the only.

“I mean,” Fletcher says, “I guess you didn’t… have… viscera, but—well.  I know what you mean.  I—thank you.”

“Are you thanking me for being a decent person?” Al asks.  “That’s setting the bar pretty low.”

She flushes, just a little.  That was the wrong call—slightly too acerbic.  He doesn’t ever want to embarrass her; nothing stings like shame.

“I guess?” she says.  “More just—it’s sometimes hardest to share the things that hurt the most.  Letting them out gives them power all over again, and they’re _bigger_ when they’re free.”

“You’re right,” Al says, partly to be conciliatory, but mostly because it’s true.  “Besides, low bars are a good thing.  Brother can reach them.”

Fletcher laughs again.  With any luck, every single one of those makes for a little bit of mending.  “Ouch.  Surely he’s taller than he was?”

“Significantly,” Al says.  “But I’ve got a full head above him, which is unfortunately the part that matters.”

There’s a solitary instant of wild synesthesia where Fletcher’s smile looks like alyssum smells, but then it’s gone.  Al thought he was past the sensory confusion phase—but this one’s all right.  This is the first time he’s ever enjoyed it.

  


* * *

  


Fletcher should not be so fascinated by Al’s incredibly single-minded focus on his food.

An amendment: Fletcher should not _let_ herself be so fascinated by it.  She can’t smother the impulse, but she could certainly do better than just sitting here, staring, as he raises his cup of tea oh-so-slowly to his lips and blows on the surface; on the way his eyelashes dip so low as he sips, gingerly, and then a hint of a smile pushes at the corners of his mouth, and the steam twirls up to nestle itself in amongst the fall of his bangs—

God, she’s going to have to do better than this.  He’ll be here for at _least_ a day; if she starts literally drooling over him two hours in, he won’t be able to help but to notice, and then he’ll never, ever, ever want to come back.

It’s not her fault—it’s really not.  The Elrics have always been like this.  They’ve always been different, special, spectacular—they’ve always been _more_.  There was something ethereal about Ed, in the old days; everyone saw it, sensed it, reacted to it.  The reactions ran the gamut from distrust to dismay to distraction, sure, but no one could ever have claimed to be unaffected.  Al had it, too, but the armor dulled the aura of him, at first, and then the mismatched lives tore some of the glamor away.

It’s back now.  It’s back, and it’s worse than ever.

He was a companion the first time they met; he was a curiosity the second.  He’s so much more now than he was, either of those times, and she’s so much less preoccupied with the war unfolding in her own psyche.

Plus he’s really, _really_ cute.

This is a disaster.  This was a mistake.  She’s doomed; she’s ruined; there’s nothing to be done—

He sips his tea, and blinks, and notices her watching, and smiles before she can duck and pretend to be engrossed in her soup, which has probably gone chilly by now.

“This is a nice place,” he says.  “A nice city.  I like it.”

That would sound both normal and noncommittal if this was anyone but Al.  The things Al wrote—the things Al felt strongly enough to vent them out on paper and mail them to _her_ , of all people, of all the people in the world—

Al spent months wondering if any place at all would ever feel right again.

Al spent months cloistered in a four-room apartment, huddled up with Ed and stacks of alchemy books, because at least a tower of impregnable tomes seemed surmountable.

Al spent months actively avoiding sunlight and sound; Al went weeks without _speaking_ , and he and Ed alike were so hamstrung by the relief that it was all they could do to lie on the floor somewhere quiet and keep breathing.

Fletcher doesn’t know exactly how long it took to drag themselves past that part.  She doesn’t need to know.  She doesn’t need to know why it was so bad when they crash-landed back here; she doesn’t need to know what sick sorts of parting gifts the other place provided.

She knows that they’re here, now, and that what Al said is _far_ bigger than it sounds like.

That’s all she needs.

“Me, too,” she says.  “It’s a good size.  People remember your name, but they’re not _constantly_ in your business.  Just a little bit.”

Al smiles again, setting the teacup down on the saucer and needlessly adjusting it until the handle’s at an angle that he seems to like.  “There’s a fine line between too-nosy and just-nosy-enough.”

“Yeah,” Fletcher says.  “Mostly people here are all right.”

“I’m glad,” Al says, looking at her again—directly into her eyes, and his are cinnamon-brown, and that color isn’t supposed to qualify as piercing.  “I really am.  You deserve to find a good place to call home.”

Fletcher puts her spoon down and pushes her soup aside without breaking the eye contact, and then she leans forward into the space she cleared.

“So do you, Al,” she says.

He blinks, startling back, blinks again—

The twitch of his mouth aspires to becoming a smile, but she doesn’t think it’s going to make it.

“I hope so,” he says.  “ _God_ , I hope so, but—some days—I don’t know.  I just don’t know.”

“I do,” she says.  “I know you.  And I know Ed by extension, even if I haven’t seen him in a long time.  And I don’t know what happened over there, exactly, but I know that both of you are more than that.”

He touches the handle of his teacup again, and this smile’s a little stronger.

“I hope,” he says, softly.  “I really hope.”

They talk about simpler things after that—smaller ones.

Fletcher doesn’t want to go back to the shop—not because she doesn’t love it; not because she hasn’t made the space so comfortably her own, but because outdoors, now, has become somewhere that Alphonse Elric likes to be.  The café table and the rolling grass of the big park and the trees swaying on the horizon line and the sky spilling pale blue above them—those belong to Al.  Those are making him happy.  He’s had so few things that were _his_ like this, so few things he wanted and could claim, even just for a moment.  She doesn’t want to make him leave.

But he keeps asking if they shouldn’t get back, keeps saying he doesn’t want to impact her business, keeps saying he doesn’t want to interrupt the order of her life.  She’s thinking the order of her life can go hang when Al is the alternative, but she can’t find a way to phrase it that isn’t rude, so she gives up and leads the way back and unlocks the front door of the shop again.

“You want to learn how to work with flowers?” she asks.  It’s sort of a last-ditch effort, but most of the alchemists she’s met are knowledge junkies; Russell spent hours staring intently while she made arrangements towards the start, because he was just that curious about the inner workings of something he’d never explored, and…

And Al’s eyes light up.  Oh, no.

“I’d love to,” he says.

  


* * *

  


Al has always liked flowers, and he’s always liked Fletcher, and he’s always liked discovery.  Maybe that’s predictable—there’s a gleam in her eye of a kind of knowingness every time his enthusiasm gets the better of him; apparently not much of this comes as a surprise.

There’s a gleam of something else, too—something… grateful?  Relieved, perhaps.  Almost wistful.

He’s probably overreaching.  Why would it matter so much to her that he’s relaxed enough to give her a glimpse of some of the feelings he hasn’t been able to put on display in a long, long time?  Sure, it’s a milestone of a sort; sure, he’ll be buying Ed truckfuls of flowers and trying to elicit the same sort of interest, but it’s not quite as imminent, for her.  Is it?

Al’s always had so much trouble differentiating between who’s family and who’s a friend.  What are the criteria supposed to be?  Is there a threshold of caring past which someone’s qualifications change?

He and Ed have had so precious few people they could rely on any time, anywhere, for any reason, that they never felt entitled to ask for that caliber of loyalty from anybody else.  It never seems right to push someone towards that—to keep shoving, inches at a time and then ungently when the crises really burst, and see how far someone will let you move them before they push back.  Sometimes it happens; sometimes the bomb goes off, and they’re in the blast radius whether you asked nicely beforehand or not, and sometimes they throw an arm over you, and sometimes they take off running, but—how do you quantify that?  How do you know when it’s a momentary impulse towards magnanimity, and when it’s because they love you like their own blood?

Sometimes it’s tougher to tell when things are good.  Some people make your happiness their own because happiness is easy to bear; some do it because they believe, deep down, at the center of their soul, that your joy should be celebrated like a hard-won victory.  Sometimes shared delight is just a passing fancy that won’t outlast their next breath.  Anyone can get excited about something small and shiny; how are you supposed to know if they’ll still be there for you, arms open, when all the lights go out?

Fletcher Tringham owes him nothing.  All he’s given her is snippets of advice and little morsels of support, doled out one pen-stroke at a time over the course of a couple of months since he and Ed dropped back here.  The equivalent exchange for that is precisely what she’s already offered him: a few equally wonderful, equally evanescent letters in return.  Nothing’s been set in stone or transcribed in blood here; nothing’s been sealed.  Nothing has been committed.  Everything she’s given him today, everything from here on out, is a gift.

He knows all too well that gifts come in a hundred-thousand facets of a hundred-thousand forms, and some of them bite your fingers when you reach for the ribbon.  He knows that some of them come cloaked in Truth and only slowly get revealed.  He knows that some of them aren’t gifts at all—they’re lessons, which have a lot in common, but they’re not the same.

Today’s are beautiful, though, literally as well as the normal way.  Fletcher shows him her little laboratory upstairs, where she works on how to trick the seeds and bulbs and cuttings into hibernating between seasons; into flowering bigger and brighter and longer than they ever could before; into leaching the nutrients they need from soil ill-suited to sustain them.  Al wonders if he could give the plants advice on that.

She shows him the garden in the back—the wooden fences run high, likely to deter anyone planning to scale them and steal either plants or secrets, but they’re brimming over nonetheless.  It’s a riot of shape and color; a contained explosion of glorious, staggering, borderline-blinding floral disarray.  It takes his breath away and doesn’t seem remotely liable to cede it back.

“You grow everything right here?” Al manages.

“Just about,” Fletcher says.  “Sometimes I special-order from bigger nurseries if I know something big is coming up.  I had someone ask for a Xingese flower last year—that was an adventure in long-distance calling.”  She crosses to a magnolia tree with flowers in sunset-orange, touching blossoms half-absently as she sidles around it.  “And an adventure in trying to translate.  I eventually got something that I wasn’t sure was the right flower, but it turned out the customer had no idea what the plant she was asking for actually looked like, so it worked out fine.”

“That’s…” Al searches for a better word and comes up empty-handed.  The raging display of the most wildly creative aspect of nature’s bounty is not helping him to plumb the depths of his vocabulary.  “…fortunate.”

Fletcher must not be too appalled by his inability to articulate himself, because she flashes a grin over her shoulder before crouching down to prod with her fingers at the soil around a flower that Al doesn’t even have a name for.  “Yeah.  Wish they were all that easy to please.  Or that easy to convince that they’re pleased because they don’t really know any better.”

A part of Al wants to say _I sure wish I was one or the other_ , but he’s still just a tiny bit too smart to speak that thought aloud.

“What’s the most popular?” he asks instead.  “Or is that sort of a trick question?  Does it depend on the time of year?”

“Nope,” Fletcher says.  “Red roses.”  She releases a pale purple flower to cup a red one instead for emphasis.  “Especially for holidays and stuff, of course, but pretty much all the time.  I dunno if that’s true other places, or if it’s something particular to this city, or this area, or… I dunno.  That’s what they like.  Classic and uncomplicated, I guess.”

“That’s sort of nice,” Al says.  He puts his hands in his pocket, which automatically hikes up his shoulders into something like a shrug.  “Even if it’s boring from your perspective, which it probably is, just… They’re looking for an expression of love.  That’s it.  Nothing fancy.  Just a statement everybody recognizes by now.”

Fletcher grins, and a few wisps of hair keep blowing into her eyes, and the world bursts with roses all around her.

“Yeah,” she says.  “There’s something sweet about it.”

Al has to wonder how much of Wellesley was like this before her—warm and welcoming and cheery and kind.  How much of this city’s character even existed before she ever opened up that door and carefully adjusted the buckets of flowers on display out beneath the awning?  How much of it did she bring with her and spread around, one person and one perfect-petaled rose at a time?

Human minds are incredibly susceptible—they mirror what’s around them; they draw things in and reflect them back.  Al’s willing to bet that Fletcher has made this place significantly better simply by inhabiting it, and she doesn’t even know it.

It feels like he blinks, and the afternoon slips through his fingers, winding backwards into the time behind them like an uncoiled ribbon, streaming away—Fletcher shows him how to balance an arrangement exactly right, how to find unexpected colors to partner to light up the room, how to fill in the gaps with little sprigs of leaves or clusters of blossoms so tiny that Al hardly wants to touch them lest they break.  The customers are intermittent, but every one of them looks at her so warmly that he can tell they visit often—except for the man who stumbles in desperate and disoriented, begging for help impressing the girl that he adores and recently spilled a full cup of coffee on.  That one doesn’t know Fletcher at all when he steps through the door, but by the time he steps back out with an armful of stems, he’s smiling, and his shoulders are squared, and his whole demeanor’s changed so much he’s almost unrecognizable as the same man who walked in.  Al gets the feeling he’ll be back.

“Well,” Al says as the sun goes down, and orange light pours through the window that’s still intact, “I should… I mean, I really ought to get out of your hair, so—”

“Oh,” Fletcher says.  She ducks her head and pays a bit too much attention to the task of counting the cash drawer.  “You don’t have to.  I mean, if you don’t want to.  I… there’s plenty of space upstairs.  I was thinking it might be… well, maybe ‘fun’ isn’t the right word, but it’d be a challenge to see if we could make another bed up there—there’s this tree that comes through the floor, is the thing; I did it on purpose, and the neighbors hate it, but it’s within building codes, and I was wondering if maybe you’d want to give some plant alchemy a try.  You’re so good at everything else, and it’s really special when you get it right, and—”

“Love to,” Al manages, feeling just as breathless even though he’s barely said a word.

Fletcher’s grin makes it worse.  Or better.  Both, he thinks.

The afternoon splits open into evening, and Fletcher has a kitchen as well-stocked as one would expect from a plant aficionado, but it turns out she is an adorably hopeless cook.  She’s an excellent assistant, though, and Al’s patience has befuddled even extremely difficult students, of which she is not one.

Dinner’s wonderful.  Moonlight pours through the broad front window of Fletcher’s little living room above the shop.  They just sit and talk about anything, nothing, everything for so long that Al almost forgets, again, that people need to sleep.

“So,” Fletcher says, levering herself up off of the couch they’ve practically molded themselves to by now and stretching both arms above her head.  “You ready to literally make the bed?”

Al says, “Sure thing,” because backing down doesn’t seem to be within the Elric genome; and Fletcher says, “Come on” and leads him into the next room over, which is a little bedroom with a large tree protruding through the wall.

“Oh,” Al says.  He can’t think of anything cleverer, and it gets the point across.

“Yeah,” Fletcher says.  She flicks on the desk light and starts sorting through the notebooks stacked to one side.  “Hang on just a…” She opens one, flips pages, and then twirls around to face him again, grinning.  She holds it out.  “What do you think?”

He looks down at a dense, detailed, absolutely marvelous little array.

“I think it’s brilliant,” he says, because that’s the truth.  “Is it going to work?”

Fletcher’s blushing.  Al is in deep, deep trouble, and he didn’t even notice.  “I have no idea.  Wanna find out?”

“Yes,” he says.

He knows that collaborative alchemy sets something strange and spectacular aflame in your soul—he did enough of it with Ed to be familiar with the feeling, even if it was usually an accident or a last resort or some combination of the two.  Alchemy is normally a solitary science, but when you put your hands to an array _with_ another person, the power courses right through both of you at once, together, and it pulls some part of you along with it.  It was hard to tell, sometimes, where Ed ended and he began, especially when both of them had bloodied hands and heavy heads to put together, and they’d spend nights leaned against each other’s shoulders trying not to sleep.  Letting the energy spin between the pair of them like a closed circuit felt natural, and new, and only a little odd.

This is different.

This is _Fletcher_.

Al loves Fletcher.  It settled into him today—fit itself into the spaces between his ribs, expanding soft and warm, like a cloud swelling larger and sweeter by the second, flush with rain.  He knew it, but not in so many words; and it’s two separate matters to pine for someone at a distance and to breathe the same air and see yourself reflected as the corners of their eyes crinkle with a smile.  It sunk in this afternoon, as he was watching her fingers dance through the colors and swing beneath the leaves: she’s beautiful, and he loves her.  It’s a deep thing—a truth acknowledged, not a fireworks show.  It’s an extension of the existing sense of trust.

Is love always about knowing someone would catch you no matter how far you fell from?  That’s a lot of what it is with Ed—a bedrock certainty that they’ll always have each other’s backs, regardless of what lies ahead.  It’s thick and full and dizzyingly tall, unlike its originator.  It’s a structural feature, not a feeling.  Al’s life is built on that kind of love—the open-ended, inexhaustible, guts-and-pulse conviction that Ed will never look at him and feel wronged or cheated, like Al should have done or been or mustered more.  He’ll always be enough.

There aren’t a lot of people that make him feel that way—Ed does the most; Winry, too; a few of their other friends.

Teacher used to, though moreso the second time around, when he wasn’t quite as terrified of her.

But he’s met a lot of people in his life, and not many of them have inspired this kind of warmth in him, like a banked fire burning, gentle and consistent, even when he turns his back.

Ed often—but not always—says that the end result is the thing that matters.  The end result of this is a swirl of merging power so heady that Al fears, for a moment, what they’re capable of; but then the lines impress themselves sharp and deep like charred marks in his mind; and the energy surges down, and in, intently; and they both channel it towards creation—towards changing, twisting, winding, reworking—

He’s less familiar with these particular sigils than with some of his own usual suspects, but he hopes that he holds his own well enough to handle half the work.  It would be unspeakable to shortchange Fletcher alchemically when she’s been so hospitable; he couldn’t bear it.  With any luck, even if his detail work isn’t quite as precise as he’d normally aspire to, the overall product will be satisfactory, and…

“Wow,” Fletcher says, sitting back on her heels.  She laughs lightly—breathlessly.  “I—that… that was a rush.”

“Yeah,” Al says, trying not to cut off the circulation in his own feet as he settles himself.  This was a lot easier when he didn’t have blood vessels to worry about.  “It’s—joint alchemy’s an… experience.”

The smile playing around Fletcher’s face pauses at her mouth long enough to quirk the corners upward.  “I’ll say.”

This whole time, they’ve been looking at each other, not the part of the tree they were supposed to reconfigure.  They both seem to realize it at once, since they turn their attention simultaneously to the curving bough of wood they’ve fashioned into something like a mattress-framing shape.

“Let me get the linens,” Fletcher says, scrambling up.  “This was—you did amazing.”

“ _You_ did amazing,” Al says.  “All the real work was yours.”

“You came in just about blind,” Fletcher says, “and still kept up.”

“I didn’t really,” Al says, “because your array was so good.”

They smile at each other.

This is—

Cautious.  Gentle.  Almost too sweet.

This feels like one of those second chances that you’re not supposed to get.

  


* * *

  


“Are you sure?” Fletcher asks once Al has settled, even though she’s already asked three times now if he really wants to sleep in their collective brainchild.

“Yes,” Al says, no less calmly or contentedly than the first three times.

Fletcher really did try to fill the entire bed-shaped space in their handiwork with enough pillows and blankets and assorted bedclothing-like fluff to make it into a big hollow of coziness not unlike a nest, but still— “If it’s weird, we can switch.  I haven’t washed my sheets, but I don’t think they’re too bad, and—”

Al laughs softly, but there’s no derision in it.  How is he possible?  “It’s really okay!  Don’t worry about it.  A couple years of no sleep taught me how to sleep just about anywhere.  This is really comfortable; I mean it.  Plus it’s going to make a great story later on.”

“A promising benchmark for any experience,” Fletcher says, but he can probably hear her smiling tentatively.  “Just—let me know if you change your mind, okay?”

“I will,” Al says.

The moonlight cuts through the center of the room, spilling silver across the floorboards, painting the little leaves extending from the branches on the bed.  The sort-of-a-bed.  The thing they made.  Fletcher’s not sure which is more amazing—the fact that it worked, the fact that Al went along with it, or the fact that she suggested it as if anyone in their proper faculties would.

The silence deepens for a few minutes, but she can hear by the rhythm of his breathing—which is incredible; it’s incredible that he _is_ breathing, now, after how and who they were when they first met; and it’s incredible that he’s so damn _close_ after all this time of trying not to wish that she could reach out and touch him—that he hasn’t slipped from waking into sleep.

She swallows, staring at the ceiling.  “Can I ask you another personal question?”  It’s too late, but the cringe that conquers her face decides to speak anyway: “Gosh, I’m sorry.  Just—sorry.  It’s none of my business.”

“I can be the judge of that,” Al says, so warmly that she feels her body relaxing in spite of her brain.  “Ask away.”

“If you’re sure,” she says.  She breathes in deep.  “What was it like sleeping after so long not being able to?”

“Ah,” Al says, and she thinks she can hear a smile in his voice.  “Wonderful.  And terrifying.  For ages I couldn’t imagine how people did it every single night—just… let go, dropped into oblivion confident they’d come back out.  It’s so much like dying.”

Fletcher’s heart was doing happy little twirly things at the revelation, but it stops cold and turns to stone.  “It—you—say that like you… like you know.”

The silence lasts long enough that she knows the answer before he clears his throat.

“Sort of,” he says.  “As much as you can when it wasn’t permanent, I guess.  Sleeping’s pretty close, except that when you’re dead, you don’t dream.”

“I guess…” She runs her tongue along her lip.  “I guess you don’t really know the difference until you wake up.  Dreams don’t matter anyway unless you remember.”

“I guess remembrance is the whole point of living,” Al says softly.  “Which is part of what made being a me who wasn’t quite the me that others knew so infuriatingly hard.  Which is…” He laughs, softer still.  “…not a topic I really should’ve broached late at night to someone I like so much.”

He—?

She’s not blushing.  She’s definitely not.

“It’s all right,” she says.  “It’s not like it’s something I never thought about before, and… I mean, conversations like this are best held at night, you know?  Dark makes it easier.”  She swallows again, and tries at a reckless grin.  “And I like it when you’re really honest.  Makes me feel like I’m getting the real deal.”

“You are,” he says.  “I wouldn’t come this far and tell anything less than the truth.”

“That makes sense,” Fletcher says.  She smiles again.  “Which is the thing, because usually people don’t.”

“You’ve got a point,” Al says, and she can hear that he’s smiling too.

The conversation peters out, and they say their goodnights, and Fletcher lies still for a few more minutes, gazing up at the ceiling, watching the faint light shift ever so slightly as the wind tugs at the tree outside.

How did she pull this off?  She invited Alphonse Elric—a human hurricane; a young man so brilliant that the world’s premiere prodigy alchemist turns to him for advice, and so dashing that he turns heads on the street everywhere he goes—to pop by for a visit, and now he’s sleeping on the opposite side of her bedroom.  Well, probably not sleeping just yet; probably winding his incomparable brain down in the hopes of sleeping in the near future, but—

But he’s here.  He’s here, and he can be an idol and a friend at once.  He can be all of the things Al is, all of the amazing things, all of the things she lives in awe of, all of the things she’d lay her fingertips against the ink of his letters on the pages and simply _wonder_ at—

And he can be a kid, too.  Someone trying to figure out how to grow up without hurting himself or anybody else any more than he has to.  Someone trying to get a handle on what it all means when every hint slips through your fingers like a buttered snake.

He can be someone who likes her.  He can be someone who likes her a lot.

Some days, the world is a well of unending misery, and everything in it is dark and evil and has your number and wants your soul.  Some days, the shadow stands bigger than any light that you can find.  Some days, it’s _hard_ , and it feels like it’s only getting harder, and the end of the tunnel’s way too distant for anybody to make out for sure.

But some days are like this.  Some days have miracles in them—little ones, but little ones count.  Little ones save the whole ungrateful world sometimes.  Ed could testify to that, although of course he wouldn’t, at least in so many words, unless there was a substantial amount of torture involved.

The point is that she’s not sure how _she’s_ supposed to sleep right now: altering her worldview to encompass this particular variety of good fortune is going to take some processing.  She has to open the shop at eight tomorrow; she really needs the sleep.  Maybe if she just… closes her eyes very tight, and stares intently into the dark, it’ll deepen, and thicken, and she’ll sink upward into it, and it’ll wrap its arms around her, like maybe Al might do, if they had more time, or the tree was a little closer, or the world was a little more inclined to wink right at you if you played your cards just right.

Maybe she needs to drag her brain back into her skull and keep it here; Al’s under no obligation to do _anything_ whatsoever, and the last thing in the universe that she wants to do is scare him off, or make him feel pressured, or act like she’s entitled to an instant of his time, when he c—

The sharp-edged _crash_ from downstairs makes her startle so hard that she bangs her elbow against the bedframe, and her whole arm ignites with pins and needles.

She’s flung herself out of bed and halfway to the door before she even remembers Al, but she doesn’t have time to hesitate, let alone look back—

Out the door, down the hall, down the stairs—so fast her head spins; she almost overbalances; she grabs for the banister and barely saves herself a header of epic proportions.  Al’s footsteps behind her answer the question she didn’t ask; of course he followed her without so much as a second thought; of _course_ he did—

She swings around the foot of the stairs and then the corner of her register desk just in time to see the second window pane shatter into an inward spray of shards of glass—

“Oh, my God,” Fletcher hears herself say, faintly.

“Oh, _hell_ , no,” she hears Al say, much less so.

The laughter that rings out from the direction of the street sounds uneven—unhinged, almost—drunk?

The real question is whether that would make it any better, or significantly worse.

Her feet propel her forward despite her better judgment hissing that she should reel back—her right hand catches up the chalk on the desktop, rolling it between her fingertips; the shedding of the dust on her skin feels safe, familiar.  It feels like power.

The frigid floor beneath her bare feet doesn’t stop her; Al’s fingers grabbing for the back of her nightshirt, accompanied by a half-voiced caveat that she doesn’t really hear, can’t slow her down.  Her heartbeat’s too loud for her inhibitions to make themselves audible, and she’s halfway to the door, then all the way to the door, then through it, then—

“Hi,” she says.

The culprit disappoints her, honestly: he looks like he’s in his mid-twenties, average height, average build, brown hair, definitely intoxicated.  She can’t tell exactly how much.  He’s hefting another rock, sizing up the next windowpane, but her greeting draws his attention.

“This is my shop,” she says.  “That’s my window.  What are you doing?”

He blinks, slowly, like it’s difficult, and then—slower still—a crooked grin jimmies its way across his face.

He curls his fingers tighter around the rock, and he focuses on her.

She drops into a crouch, chalk loose and swift between her fingers, and scrawls a smooth array on the widest cobblestone beneath her feet.

“The hell are you drawin’ for?” the guy asks, and she doesn’t know enough about liquor to estimate the volume behind the slurring of his voice.

“You should really get to know something about a person before you start breaking their windows,” she says.  She tacks the sigil on, glances up, and nods at the rock in his hand.  “Were you going to throw that at me?”

The grin twists into a smirk.  “Maybe.”

Soft footfalls behind her alert her to Al’s presence at her side, and then his fingertips graze her shoulder-blade.  “Then _maybe_ you’re going to get out of this in one piece,” he says.  He lets his hands fall loose at his sides.  “No promises.”

The guy’s eyes flick between Al’s face and hers.  The smirk curls deeper, darker, meaner— “That’s real cute, kid, but if you think for a second—”

The pause lasts longer than it might if he hadn’t drunk enough to muddle his own brain, but he draws his arm back, poised to hurl the rock at _Al_ , this time, and—

Nope.  Not a _damn_ chance.

Fletcher flattens both hands on the array, letting her eyes slide halfway shut, letting the light run through her—emerald-bright, feverish, ferocious—

She reaches for the ground, for the planet, for the _life_ , and it reaches back.

The road shakes—cobbles clacking against each other—and then the vines sprout too thick for containment, shoving themselves through, unfurling upward, wrapping themselves around this stupid vandal’s stupid _arms_ first—

And then his chest, then his legs, then his neck—sort-of-gently—until he’s trussed up like a holiday ham.

Fletcher has to admit that, even in her head, that comparison is somewhat weak.  He is much less appetizing than a ham in pretty much every possible way.

He starts writhing against the vines the instant that they go still, but they’ve cinched in close enough that he won’t get anywhere.

“Good luck,” Fletcher says anyway.  This jerk’s earned a little sarcasm.  “Why are you doing this?”

The combination of massive rumbling beneath the street, shattering cobblestones, and voices has apparently drawn the notice of a few of her neighbors—lights flick on in some of the windows above, though she doesn’t look away from their captured quarry long enough to see if any sets of shutters open or not.

“You should leave,” the guy says, which snaps her attention back to him in a hurry.

“I don’t want to leave,” she says.  “I like it here.”

“Tough shit,” the guy says.  “Don’t like _you_.”

“You don’t?” she asks.  “Or the city doesn’t?  Because everybody I’ve met—”

His lip curls into an extraordinarily ugly combination of a sneer and a snarl.

“You’re not a real g—”

“If you finish that sentence,” Al says, “you will lose so many teeth that you won’t be able to speak any other sentences for a long, long time.”

Fletcher’s heart beats faintly against the back sides of her ribs, like a weak-winged bird in a small cage.

“She’s a girl,” Al says, “and she’s an amazing one, and if you don’t like it, _you_ should leave.  I’d suggest voluntarily—although I can handle it if you aren’t worried about making your relocation with your skeletal system intact.”

The ugly expression deepens and somehow increases in ugliness.  “Who the hell are you?”

The smile Al offers him is small, delicate, and so _cold_ that Fletcher—Fletcher, who knows him, who adores him, who can’t wait to go upstairs and lie down again where she can hear him breathe—almost gives in to the instinct to take a step back.

“Someone who’s not accountable to anybody here,” Al says.  “Someone who’s gotten out of jail time and lawsuits and scrapes with death the likes of which you can’t even imagine a hundred times before.  Someone with very little to lose and very, _very_ few reasons to go easy on you.”  He tilts his head and raises an eyebrow, and the neutrality of his expression is what makes it terrifying.  “Someone you’d be afraid of if you were smart enough.”

The guy’s eyes narrow, and his mouth shifts, but he doesn’t say anything.  His eyes dart up and down over Al’s face, and then up to the vines pinning just about every muscle he might want to use.

“Understood?” Al asks.

The guy swallows, slings another sideways glance at Fletcher, and then slowly nods.

“Good,” Al says.  “You’re going to stay here with your mouth shut, and we’re going to call the cops, and they’re going to find some way to punish you that’s a lot more legal than what I’d do.  Clear?”

Another nod.

“Great,” Al says, brightly.  “Fletcher, c’mon.”

He holds his arm out to her, and by the time she wonders if she’s misinterpreting the gesture, it’s way too late—she’s already fitted herself in under his shoulder and hooked her own arm around the small of his back, curling her fingers into the soft flannel of his pajama shirt.

He doesn’t say anything as he leads them back inside.  Maybe she was right.  Maybe he’s just too nice to push her away.  Maybe a lot of things.

“I like these,” she says, tugging carefully on the shirt.  “I didn’t really see them earlier.”

They’re off-white, with a pattern of little calico cats.  He changed into them after a shower, and it was too dark in the bedroom for her to tell what the repeated pictograms were.  The cats are all making different facial expressions.

“Thank you,” Al says.  “Brother got them for me—the day we landed back here, actually.  I don’t think he was ready to go out yet, but he did it anyway.  He came back sort of shaky, but you know how he gets when he’s got his mind set on something.  He said this was my first sleep at home as _me_ , and he was going to make it the best one ever if it killed him.”

“Glad it didn’t,” Fletcher says.

“Me, too,” Al says.  He picks up the phone on her desk and holds it out.  “Would you like to do the honors, or shall I?”

The honors don’t take long, and neither do the cops: she and Al sit in the shop with the door open while they wait.  The guy outside is obediently quiet, which is awfully nice for a change.

He’s less quiet when two police officers arrive, stare in disbelief at the shredded cobblestones and the vine monstrosity raising him off of the ground, and then stare at Fletcher and Al while they tell the story, brief as it is.

“All right,” the officer who appears to be in charge—he has more medals on his shirt, and he carries himself with more confidence—says to the evening’s miscreant.  “Let’s hear it from your side.  Did you put those holes in this young lady’s window?”

The guy looks at the cop, then over at Fletcher, and then at Al.  Al slides his hands into his pockets and smiles.

The guy looks at the cop again.

“Yeah,” he says.

The cop’s eyebrows go up, but he doesn’t pause in scribbling on a little notebook.  “Okay.  Were you planning to do more damage to her property?”

“Probably,” the guy says.

The second cop blinks repeatedly.  “Sir, how drunk are you?”

“Dunno,” the guy says.  “How do you measure that?”

“I think that qualifies as an answer,” the first cop mutters.  He clears his throat and turns to Fletcher and Al.  “Could you… let him down?  We’re supposed to read him his rights and cuff him at the same time.  He’ll have to pay for the damages.”  A pause.  “Sir, did you… you didn’t break the other window _first_ , did you?”

The guy, still strung up and gazing around himself, says, “Might’ve.”

“It’s a yes-or-no question,” the cop says.

“Shades’f gray,” the guy says, sagely.  “Whole world’s shades of gray.”

“Sure is,” Al says.  “Open your mind; embrace the complexity of the universe; blah, blah.  Breaking someone’s windows just because you don’t like them is still objectively wrong.”

The second cop cracks a grin.  “Hear, hear.”

“I don’t buy that,” the guy says.

“Unfortunately for you,” the first cop says, “the law buys it wholesale, including tax, and you just confessed in full.”  He turns to Al and Fletcher, so Fletcher drops to her knees and lays both hands on her array again.  The vines creak, slither, twist—and then retract, slowly but steadily, and carefully let the man back down onto the ground, where he stumbles as he tries to find his feet.  The lead cop reaches out and grabs one of his wrists while he’s still staggering.  “You have the right to remain silent, though at this rate, I doubt you’re going to use it.  You have the right to…” He glances over.  “You two are all set.  Thanks for your help.”

“Always happy to comply with the law, officer,” Al says.  “Thank you for taking care of it.  Would you like Fletcher’s phone number in case you have any questions about how to reimburse her for the windows?”

Fletcher spends significantly longer than strictly necessary dusting the chalk off of the knees of her pajama pants: otherwise, they’d all see her blushing hot, bright pink at just how _good_ it is having Al beside her with one hand resting lightly on her shoulder, presence warm and sweet and gentle like a candle in the night.

Whatever she did to deserve this—whatever the equivalency was—she’s going to have to make sure to keep on doing it.

  


* * *

  


The second day is as beautiful as the first.  Breakfast; gardening; lunch; arrangements.  Food and flowers and Fletcher.  Al’s not sure he could do any better if he tried.

The problem is that beauty isn’t a cure; and all things end, even the beautiful ones—especially those.

He can feel it.  He can feel the whole world pulling too hard on his skin.  He can feel the teeth in the shadows; he can feel the almost-whispered threats in the shift of the air.  He can feel his heart pounding even when there’s nothing definitively wrong—nothing anyone can see, anyway.  Nothing but the way the universe _is_.  Nothing but the Truth.

He knows he has to go.  Is it running away, or just retreating?  A retreat is strategic.  There’s no cowardice in that.

Is there?

One of their other primary activities for the day, of course, is repairing nearly the entire façade of Fletcher’s shop, thanks to their late-night visitor’s attempts to rush-remodel the whole thing for her.

“Here,” Fletcher says, hefting a huge burlap bag out from behind a display and setting it on the floor.  It makes a tinkly sort of crunching sound, which rather betrays the contents before she adds: “I saved all the pieces of the first window, since I figured it’s easier to fix it than replace it, so…”

“Perfect,” Al says, which is a word for it, albeit perhaps not the aptest one.  “Why don’t I tackle the windows, and you can get the sidewalk?  You can’t spend much time around Brother without getting pretty good at realigning broken glass.”

Fletcher grins.  “Thought you might say that.”  She steps outside, puts her hands on her hips, and looks thoughtfully down at the tumult of dirt and leaves and cracked cobblestones that last night left behind.  “Guess I went a little overboard.”

“Maybe,” Al says.  “But it was pretty amazing.”

She tilts her head down further, so he pretends not to see the touch of pink in her cheeks as she kicks a toe at a clod of dirt.  “It’s… I mean, I guess it’s sort of funny.  There was something your brother said that stuck with me.”

“ _Ed_?” Al says.

She flashes another grin.  She has so many of them.  “Unless you have another brother.”

“Well, that’s—complicated,” Al manages, “but—mostly, no, but—what I meant was—you got good advice from Ed at fifteen?  I feel like we should stop the presses or something.  He’s always been smarter than is good for him, obviously, but I don’t think I ever would’ve called him wise.”  He winces.  That’s unfair.  “At least… not until after we met you.  Well after.  We’d been hurt more by then.”

Fletcher winces, too, which wasn’t what he was going for.  “Maybe he got lucky.  I dunno.  Just—what he said.  He said ‘Do no harm, take no shit.’  Then he qualified it with… a lot of stuff, actually, like ‘Buildings don’t count for the harm part, because they don’t feel pain, and you can fix them anyway, and budgets don’t count, and stupid Mustang doesn’t count,’ I think, but—still.  It stuck with me.  The first part, anyway.”

Al smiles, and he makes sure to let the whole expression unfold on his face, so she’ll know he means it.

“Ed can be like that,” he says.  “Sometimes he really gets to the heart of it.  Usually not on purpose, exactly, but… he has a weird angle on the world, but every now and again, things tilt enough that his perception is perfect.”

Fletcher blinks at him.  What did he—?

“That,” she says, “is a _beautifully_ savage short joke.”

“Statistically demographically average-sized joke, you mean,” Al says.  “I think they’re just so ingrained now that I could make them in my sleep.”

“Requires a proportionate amount of effort?” Fletcher asks, sunnily.

Al grins back.  “Something like that.”

She holds out her hand, and for a second, his instinct is just to—take it.  Just wrap it up in his hand hold it, maybe swing it, maybe squeeze it really tight for a second and then tangle their fingers up together, maybe—

Chalk.  She’s turning it over, opening it up, and offering him one of the pieces of chalk resting in her palm.

“Thank you,” he says.

And it’s good.  It’s good to be helping; it’s good to be fixing things—good to be making things; good to be channeling the power and the potential into something constructive.  Something reconstructive.  It’s good to be setting things right.  It’s good to be establishing something that will protect her livelihood to some degree, even if it’s susceptible to perils as stupid as a drunk bigot bearing rocks.

He wants her to be happy.

He really does.

But as the transmutation marks climb the glass, stretching up along it underneath his fingertips, he can see it in his own face as the windowpanes rise in front of him, and his reflection expands.

This has been the right amount of time.  Anything longer would start to strain the parts of him that are thin, still—fragile, insubstantial.  They’re growing back, but the scar tissue spreads so agonizingly slowly, and then it’s thick and tight and difficult to move.  It doesn’t like to bend.  Second chances aren’t like the first ones; they come coupled with restrictions, with _reminders_ , so that you don’t forget what you almost lost forever.  Scabs aren’t as flexible as skin.  If you’re not careful, they crack, and they break, and you bleed all over again.

That’s how it’s meant to be.  Life’s one long, long lesson.

He wants her to be happy—he _does_ ; he tries to think it at her loud enough for her to hear it as they sit down to dinner—but he knows…

He knows.

They cooked together again.  It was nice; all of this is nice.  It feels good.  It’s just that there’s a sliver in him—something cold, something itchy, something niggling in the back of his brain, scraping its fingernails down his spine.

She twirls her fork into the pasta, but she doesn’t pick it up off of the plate—just looks at him until he opens his mouth to ask, but then she beats him to it.

“You’re leaving,” she says, softly.

That feels like a spear through the throat.  He tries always to be grateful for the physical sensations that accompany emotions, even when they’re ones like this.  Sometimes it’s tougher than others.  “I… yeah.  How…”

“You’re carrying yourself a little different,” she says.  “You… your body’s… turned towards the door.  Just a little.  But it’s there.”  He cringes so hard that his jaw almost aches.  “It’s okay,” she says, and she reaches out for half a second, but then she retracts her hand just as quickly.  “I mean it.  It’s really okay.  I understand.”

She doesn’t.  She couldn’t.  But it’s kind of her to say.

“I’m sorry,” he says.  How often in his life has he told so many truths in succession to anybody other than Ed?

“It’s okay,” she says again.  She smiles.  “I’m just glad you came.  It’s been really wonderful.  And I’m glad you _wanted_ to come.  You could’ve gone anywhere, but you came here, and that’s—really special.  I hope it was special for you, too.”

“It was,” Al says.  “I mean—it is.  It—this was so much more than I could’ve hoped for.  It’s been really amazing.  You’ve been really amazing.  I didn’t… I didn’t plan on it being this good.  It’s just—”

“Hey,” Fletcher says.  She puts her fork down, sets an elbow on the tabletop, rests her chin on her hand, and smiles at him.  “You don’t have to justify yourself to me.  Not right now.  Not ever.  I’ve got your back.  Okay?”

It’s possible that she’s gotten a sense, from the letters, and from what he’s left unwritten in them, how much that means to him.  It’s possible she has an idea how significant it is to hear that, now, after what he’s been through, and the way so many people have pushed him and Ed alike to the edge of cliff faces every time that they trusted enough to try to close their eyes.

It’s possible, too, that she’s speaking from her own heart, because so few people in her life have stood beside and behind her when she needed them the most.

It’s possible that they’re more alike than he’s even come to terms with.  It’s possible that convergent evolution has made it easier than he dreamed of for them to understand each other after all.

“Okay,” he says.

It’s possible he’s a better friend—or more-than-friend, or something-like-a-friend, or something-slightly-warmer—long distance in any case.  It’s possible that he’s destructive up close; even when he tries to keep it all wrapped up and smoothed out, he knows the danger seeps through sometimes.  He’s convinced it’s inscribed on their father’s genome somewhere; he and Ed have too much in common underneath the more evident divergence of personality traits.  It’s possible Al will be able to support Fletcher much more efficiently in missives and letters and little parcels and the occasional telegram than he ever could if he started renting an apartment down the street.

It’s also possible he’s done some good here.  It’s possible that his physical presence gave her reassurances that no words on a page ever could.  It’s possible that the act of _arriving_ reinforced the notion that everything he wrote could very well be true.  It’s possible he proved more by being here than he ever could have evidenced in text.

A lot of things are possible.

That’s extraordinary, for a change.

  


* * *

  


Fletcher’s been meaning for years to read up on olfactory memories—maybe someone knows where their power originates, and why it’s so sudden and so intense.  Maybe someone’s been looking into it and can explain to her why train smoke used to smell like excitement, back when she and Russell used to travel; but now it makes her heart sink down until she expects there to be blood leaking into her shoes.  Train stations smell like people leaving.  Even the first whiff of ash in the air makes her _hurt_.

“I’ll send a telegram when I get back,” Al says.

“You don’t have to,” Fletcher says, and she wasn’t going to ask for it—she wouldn’t put him out, and to trouble, over something as insignificant as her peace of mind—but…

“I want to,” Al says.  They shuffle forward one more step in the queue at the ticket window as another prospective passenger peels off from the line and starts across the platform.  “I don’t want you to have to wait for a _letter_.”

This is such a specific sort of agony—wanting to be through the line; wanting to be done with the pointless standing-around, and simultaneously wishing it would never end, and they’d never finish, and Al would never go.  The cognitive dissonance makes it resonate in her chest all the harder, all the louder—amplifies the frequency of the throbbing of the pain.

“I know there’s nothing that the world can throw at you that you can’t handle,” she says.

“Still,” Al says.  “I know how it feels having to wait for news about somebody.  I try to avoid imposing that on others.”

Fletcher does her best to arch an eyebrow at him.  “Have you ever imposed on anyone in your life?”

He grins back.  “Depends on who you ask.  Guess that’s true of everything.”

“I’m asking you,” Fletcher says.

Al gazes up at the lettering above the ticket window, as if the trail of harried-looking human beings wouldn’t give it away.

“You probably shouldn’t,” he says.  “I’m biased.  I feel like I’m a burden to pretty much everyone.”

She can’t stop herself fast enough: the words just… jump.  “You know you’re spending too much time with Ed if you even _think_ that, right?”

“Yes,” Al says, calmly, before she can cram a fist into her mouth and promise never to speak again.  “But I think it may take both of us working together to get past the codependency problems, ironically enough.”

Fletcher’s heart had leapt into her throat, and in the couple of seconds it takes her to choke it back down to a more reasonable position in her body, Al’s expression doesn’t waver from faintly-amused neutrality.

“I…” she attempts.  “I didn’t mean to…”

He flashes her a grin.  “Please don’t be sorry—I mean that.  We’ve got issues.  That’s a fact.  I’m not ashamed of it, and I don’t see any reason to shy away from acknowledging exactly what they are.  Sometimes telling someone else is a big part of recognizing that it’s important enough that you need to deal with it, and articulating the problem is half of figuring out how you’re going to solve it.”  The grin softens.  “So—thank you, really.”

“I’m not sure what just happened,” Fletcher says, “but you’re… welcome?”

Doesn’t he know how unfair it is of him to smile at her like that—to smile at her like anything, really?  All of his smiles are devastating, and all of them are torture when he’s about to step up to the ticket window and then further up, onto a train, and disappear into the pale light of the morning.

“One to Central City, please,” he says to the girl sitting behind the window.

Fletcher looks over and up at one of the lampposts.  Lampposts are nice and unassuming, but they’re also largely unsympathetic, so it does help level out the sudden sting of tears behind her eyes, but it doesn’t do much for the answering twist of her heart.

He’ll write.  She knows he’ll write.  And she knows that can be enough—for a long time, for a _really_ long time, maybe forever, if it has to be.  He’s truly remarkable in the most fundamental sense of the word, and any form of contact from him is a gift that she’s not entitled to.  It’s generous of him sharing everything he has.  She knows that.  And she’s grateful; she _is_.  It’s not that she expects him to give her more of himself; she recognizes how difficult it was for him to make it all this way, and how important it is that he’s offered her everything he has.  She doesn’t mean to undermine any of that, or take a single thing for granted; it’s just—

It’s just that being alone starts to wear on you, after a while.  It starts to wear you down.  And you can grind glass right back into sand if you keep at it long enough.

It’s going to be all right.  She knows it is.  Ripping off the bandage is the hardest part of healing when it’s a little wound like this.  She’s suffered bigger, and deeper, and worse, and come out on the other side alive.

She’ll make it.  She knows she will.

Al tucks his ticket into the breast pocket of his coat, and she follows him away from the line to let the next person purchase their pass to anywhere.  It’s a good thing.  It’s a good thing for Al.  He gets to go home.  He gets to rest; gets to recuperate; gets to hole up in the safe place where he and Ed have been working on recharging their old energy all this time.  He’s getting better—she could feel it in the letters, and this visit proved it with a thousand brand-new data points.  He’s getting better, and someday soon, he might be able to part from safety for a whole heck of a lot longer at a stretch.

“Can I get you a coffee?” he asks, gesturing at the little kiosk with the hand not burdened by a suitcase.  “We’ve got a couple minutes.”

“I’m okay,” Fletcher says, which is better than _I think adding caffeine to this would make me feel the same way, only faster, and with more emphasis_.  “Can I get you a cup of tea, though?”

“Only if you let me get you one,” Al says.

She smiles at him.  She just can’t help it.  “At that point, shouldn’t we each get our own?”

“Where’s the fun in that?” Al asks.  “You can’t have an equivalent exchange if nothing is redistributed.”

“Gosh,” Fletcher says, blinking as innocently as possible.  “Here I thought you were trying to do something nice for me, and really it was just about an alchemy metaphor all along.”

Al tries very hard to look hurt, but the grin cracks through immediately.  “Why can’t it be both?”

“At risk of sounding like your brother,” Fletcher says, starting towards the kiosk and rummaging for her wallet, “things can’t be two things at once.”

Al’s hand grazes her back as he moves up alongside her—or did she imagine that?  Is wishful thinking really powerful enough to toy with her nerves that much?  “That… really does sound like Ed.”

It sure is delightful to have left one line only to step directly into a different one.  Fletcher supposes that’s life, though, when you get right down to it—waiting for things that might or might not turn out to be what you anticipated; and the conversations crammed in between are usually more important than what you’re waiting for.

“Maybe you should bring him with you next time,” she says.  The foot-in-the-mouth stomach-drop reaction takes a second to kick in, but kick in it does, with gusto.  “I mean—if—you want to.  If you want a next time, and if you want to bring him, and if—”

“I like that idea a lot,” Al says, brightly.  “What kind of tea would you like?”

There’s time to sip as much of it as she thinks is wise to pour into her roiling stomach before his train pulls up to the platform, so she tosses it into the trash bin as the people start pouring out through the doors.  Al throws his away, too, and then they’re starting over towards the platform edge, and steam billows skyward, and—

And this is it.  No amount of foot-dragging or denial or desperation can stop it now.

Al curls his fingers a little tighter around the handle of his suitcase, and when she looks up from that probably-too-acute observation, he’s looking back at her.  There’s a little line of concern between his brows, and a turn of his mouth that reinforces it—like he’s worried; or maybe like he’s thinking, but he’s not quite sure if what he’s thinking of is a good idea; or possibly b—

He leans in and kisses her.

It’s very brief and very light and very soft and not quite as warm as she expected, and his eyelashes brush her cheek, and then he draws back and swallows, and the flick of his eyes up and down her face looks uncertain.

“Oh,” she hears herself breathe.

“Sorry,” he manages, and the pain beneath it feels like the sound of her old rake’s tines scraping on the cobblestones.

“I’m not,” she says.

He blinks, which is cute; and then he starts to smile, which is even cuter.

“Oh,” he says.  “Well—I’m—not either.”

“Okay,” she says.  “You get one lie for free.”

“Good,” he says.  “I’m sorry I lied.  That one’s true.”

“You can make it up to me later,” she says, presumably because the shock’s set in now, and she doesn’t even know what the hell she’s thinking.

He leans down again, swifter this time, and brushes his mouth across her forehead this time.

“I will,” he says.  “That’s true, too.”

The train whistle screeches loud enough that she jumps.

“Damn,” he says.  “Okay, I—”

“I know,” she says.  “G’bye.  Travel safe.  Write soon.”

“I will,” he says, and his fingertips graze along her jaw for just half a second before he turns and strides off across the platform towards the train.

The tears climbing her throat scrape the walls of it with hot, stinging claws, and the ones welling at the corners of her eyes feel too heavy to hold in.  She shouldn’t cry; she _shouldn’t_ ; it’s not even a bad thing, really.  Just a thing.  Just a fact.  Just another moment that will pass soon; she has to get through it one way or another.

Crying helps, sometimes, though, or at least doesn’t make it worse.  Sometimes if you can get it all out in one go, it drains the emotional pressure like a release valve on a dam, and then you can hold yourself together better for the long haul.

Still embarrassing, though.  It makes her feel fragile, and she hates that; she knows that deep down she’s not.

“Hey, hey,” a man beside her says, and she glances at him through the pearly swimming filter on her vision.  Moderately tall, goatee, glasses, green eyes, gentle little smile.  “Is the first sentence too early in our acquaintance to say ‘It’s going to be okay’?”

“Nah,” Fletcher says.  The smile’s what does it.  Probably there are people out there who can fake that sort of thing, but she hasn’t met one yet, and it warms her heart up even while her guts are churning.  “It’s—it is.  I know it is.  Just—hard to let go.”

“Believe me,” the man says softly, gazing at the train.  “I know.”

“I just want him to come back,” Fletcher says, pushing through the way her voice tries to crack.

“For a nice girl like you?” the man says.  “He will.”

“I don’t know,” Fletcher says, and the tears fill up her whole throat, and she has to choke-swallow twice before she can add: “I hope so.”  Al emerges from the crowd, skips up the steps, reaches back with his free hand to help a pregnant woman up them, and then slips through the door to the train car, ushering her along ahead of him.  “I—I just—it’s selfish.  I don’t just want him to come back.  I want him to _stay_.”

“He’s got a look about him like he doesn’t know how just yet,” the man says.  His voice softens.  “But people change.  And good people usually change for the better.”

They do.  She has.  Al has.  And the world has around them.

“Yeah,” she says.  Maybe it’s the blur of the tears, or maybe it’s wishful thinking alone, but she swears she can see Al’s shape moving through the train.  It’s too effortlessly graceful and unerringly polite to be anyone else’s shadow.  “That’s true.  Thank y—”

She turns, but the man with the glasses is gone.

She can’t see him anywhere, but it’s a big crowd for a morning train, and there are lots of exits, and… and Al’s probably about to get to the window, and maybe he’ll wave.

He is.

He does.

He’s smiling.

And he blows her a kiss, and then he winks, and then he blushes bright pink, and then he ducks inside.

It’s not too often that the departure of someone you want nothing but more of leaves you smiling.  Fletcher’s going to treasure this one for the backwards sort of blessing that it is.

It’s what you do with what you get that matters, isn’t it?  What you do, and the person you become.

She’s become someone she’s proud of, and someone that matters to the people she admires most.  Al’s only a postage stamp away, and Russell might come visit soon, and there are a whole heck of a lot of flowers in bloom in her little garden, waiting to be picked.

People change.  She probably will, in little ways, from here on out until forever.

But today—right this second—she is much more than enough.


End file.
